Customers shoot at the indoor shooting range at the Strip Gun Club in Las Vegas, Nev. on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. On Oct. 1, a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay opened heavy fire on a crowd of more than 22,000 at Route 91 Harvest outdoor country music festival, which fatally wounded 58 people and injured more than 500 people. (Photo by Rachel Luna, OC Register/SCNG)

After the Route 91 Harvest festival massacre, Las Vegas residents created an informal memorial at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, not far from casinos, one of the world’s largest souvenir shops and the Strip Gun Club.

Although its darkened windows and red-and-black color scheme make it look like its business is naked women, the Strip Gun Club is a shooting range. Inside, customers can spend between $100 and $2,000 to shoot pistols, sniper rifles and automatic weapons, choosing from a menu that features beautiful women holding the firearms.

The range also features chromed .50 caliber machine guns, which the range’s website boasts that former TV news anchor Dan Rather once referred to as “the mother of all machine guns.”

The Strip Gun Club is not the only Las Vegas range catering to tourists eager to try out the firearms they’ve seen in movies and TV. In addition to the legal gambling, drinking, strip clubs and recreational marijuana, Las Vegas allows visitors to use weaponry that may be illegal in their home states and countries.

“Here, you’re 007 undercover, a strike force operative, or head of the ranger battalion,” the Strip Gun Club’s website reads. (Owners and managers of the range declined to comment for this report.)

Two-and-a-half miles away, and just off the Strip, Machine Guns Vegas offers a $110 “femme fatale” package, giving women the chance to fire pink automatic and semiautomatic weapons.

For $3,999, Vegas Outdoor Adventures will let tourists fire an automatic rifle from a helicopter, and “fulfill your shooting machine gun fantasies,” according to their website. Customers can even get a pizza lunch afterward.

Battlefield Las Vegas offers a $159 Call of Duty: Black Ops package, intended to simulate the popular video game: “Trade in your video game controller and headset for an AK-47, Uzi, MP5, and a Colt Commando,” the company’s site reads in part.

No one is breaking the law here: Nevada has expansive gun rights, especially compared to California. The Vegas Machine Gun Experience even offers a $199 package called the 2nd Amendment Shooting Experience.

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group which advocates for stricter gun laws, gives Nevada an F and ranks it 27th in the nation in gun laws. California gets an A-, and is ranked tops in the nation.

“Local governments in Nevada generally lack authority to regulate firearms and ammunition, and Nevada requires local law enforcement to issue a concealed handgun license to any applicant who meets certain basic qualifications,” the group writes on its website.

The main entrance of Strip Gun Club in Las Vegas, Nev. on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. On Oct. 1, a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay opened heavy fire on a crowd of more than 22,000 at Route 91 Harvest outdoor country music festival, which fatally wounded 58 people and injured more than 500 people. (Photo by Rachel Luna, OC Register/SCNG)

Strip Gun Club in Las Vegas, Nev. on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. On Oct. 1, a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay opened heavy fire on a crowd of more than 22,000 at Route 91 Harvest outdoor country music festival, which fatally wounded 58 people and injured more than 500 people. (Photo by Rachel Luna, OC Register/SCNG)

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Strip Gun Club in Las Vegas, Nev. on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. On Oct. 1, a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay opened heavy fire on a crowd of more than 22,000 at Route 91 Harvest outdoor country music festival, which fatally wounded 58 people and injured more than 500 people. (Photo by Rachel Luna, OC Register/SCNG)

Customers shoot at the indoor shooting range at the Strip Gun Club in Las Vegas, Nev. on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. On Oct. 1, a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay opened heavy fire on a crowd of more than 22,000 at Route 91 Harvest outdoor country music festival, which fatally wounded 58 people and injured more than 500 people. (Photo by Rachel Luna, OC Register/SCNG)

“This is the next (Ultimate Fighting Championship),” said owner Nephi Oliva. “The only way to top the UFC is to throw a gun in the cage, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

His facility hosts a lot of bachelor parties and after-parties, and some customers just come to watch friends or other customers battle it out. But Las Vegas Gunfights also does a lot of business training civilians, law enforcement and military professionals, Oliva said.

In the week following the Oct. 2 mass shooting, one side of the business spiked, while the other dropped off, at least temporarily.

“We had over 600 people register for our gunfight academy in the days following the shooting,” Oliva said. But the Friday night gunfights had about half their regular attendance Oct. 6, and Las Vegas Gunfights just decided to have a more low-key evening in their lounge.

“I said, ‘We’ve seen enough gun violence in Vegas this week, so let’s just play beer pong and hang out,'” he said. “But the sign-ups for training, people are starting to take it more seriously.”

There’s currently no publicly available evidence that Nevada resident Stephen Paddock, the man who fired into the crowd from across the street in a room at the Mandalay Bay resort, patronized or trained at any of these clubs.

Oliva said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives questioned him about whether Paddock had trained at Las Vegas Gunfights, which Oliva said didn’t happen.

“At that distance, he wasn’t shooting for accuracy,” Walker said. “He was putting as much lead downrange as he could to attack that crowd. When you have that many people, and that big of a crowd, there wasn’t a whole lot of skill needed to impact the crowd.”

And that was made even easier by shooting from his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay on the west side of the Strip.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Walker said. “He was on the side of the exits. They were running toward the bullets.”

Paddock also made mistakes a trained person wouldn’t have, according to Oliva.

“A trained person would work on one platform and master that platform,” he said.” This guy brought 19 guns; he didn’t know which one was best. A trained person wouldn’t have the gun jam and put it aside; a trained person would clear that in one second. And a trained person wouldn’t use a bump stock; those are novelties.”

In general, those who live near the sites of mass shootings tend to be more receptive to new restrictions on guns, according to research published earlier this month by Benjamin Newman, an associate professor of public policy and political science at UC Riverside.

“On average, Las Vegas residents would be more supportive of gun restrictions than other people right now,” Newman said.

For about five to 10 years, people who live close to a mass shooting are more supportive of restrictions on guns, according to his research, but that effect disappears after 20 years.

Newman is from Las Vegas himself and his mother attended the Route 91 Harvest festival. She was not hurt.

Charles Blek, president of the Orange County chapter of the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence, said he has no problem with ranges where people can shoot semi-automatic weapons.

“As long as they’re following the law and the appropriate safeguards are in place, I have no problem with that,” he said.

The Brady Campaign is not about taking guns away, but about advocating for responsible gun policy, he said.

“There’s a lot of money there, and money talks in Las Vegas,” Gates said. “I don’t see any politicians really trying that in Las Vegas. It would be like banning strip clubs because of sex trafficking, and that’s not happening.”

Beau Yarbrough wrote his first newspaper article taking on an authority figure (his middle school principal) when he was in 7th grade. He’s been a professional journalist since 1992, working in Virginia, Egypt and California. In that time, he’s covered community news, features, politics, local government, education, the comic book industry and more. He’s covered the war in Bosnia, interviewed presidential candidates, written theatrical reviews, attended a seance, ridden in a blimp and interviewed both Batman and Wonder Woman (Adam West and Lynda Carter). He also cooks a mean pot of chili.